Color, Class, and Carnality Collide in Alan Hollinghurst’s New Novel
When Alan Hollinghurst published his scandalizing début, “The Swimming-Pool Library,” in 1988, the lives of gay men were hardly virgin territory for the English novel. Some years earlier, as a graduate student at Oxford, Hollinghurst had written a master’s thesis on “the creative uses of homosexuality” in three of his more guarded forebears—E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L. P. Hartley—though there the emphasis, naturally enough, fell on “the stimulating effects of constraint.” “The Swimming-Pool Library,” by contrast, was a work of revolutionary candor that laid bare, in exquisite prose, the cut and thrust of queer existence in early-eighties London. Its attitude toward the euphemistic delicacy of a previous era is nicely encapsulated in a moment from a novel that Hollinghurst came out with three decades later, “The Sparsholt Affair,” when a character spots on an acquaintance’s wall “a red chalk drawing of a naked man, with a body-builder’s chest and ridged stomach, artily cut off at the knee and the neck, and with a high-minded blur where the cock and balls should be.” A high-minded blur will never do for Hollinghurst, the great depixelator of carnal truths.
In the wryly sex-positive lyric “The Collar-Bone of a Hare,” W. B. Yeats imagines setting sail for a distant land where merrymaking natives will teach him that the highest good is “To change my loves while dancing / And pay but a kiss for a kiss.” From the shores of this liberated realm, he would then look back, laughing with a sort of relieved disbelief, “At the old bitter world where they marry in churches.” Yeats’s erotic utopia sounds a lot like the gay subculture revealed by Hollinghurst’s novels, in which the spontaneity and freedom of male lovers, who trade but a kiss for a kiss (and often rather more), stand in withering contrast to the dreary conformity of heterosexual monogamy. Hollinghurst is no utopian, but he does present gay eros as a cross-cutting force, uniting people across differences of age and class and race, even if the people so united are seldom on an entirely equal footing.
For many of his protagonists, including Will Beckwith, the maraudingly promiscuous upper-class narrator of “The Swimming-Pool Library,” these differences, and racial difference in particular, are a potent aphrodisiac. “I was eight years older than Arthur, and our affair had started as a crazy fling with all the beauty for me of his youngness and blackness,” Will says of a new West Indian lover. “I saw him becoming more and more my slave and my toy, in a barely conscious abasement which excited me even as it pulled me down.” The transgressive tingle of such sentences has dulled a little over time; the contemporary reader may find their strident fetishism more than a touch distasteful. Though Hollinghurst puts clear moral daylight between himself and his narrator, a monster of privilege who boasts of belonging to “that tiny proportion of the populace that indeed owns almost everything,” he follows Will in treating Arthur largely as a sexual prop. Like most of the Black and brown characters in Hollinghurst’s novels, he is there to be seen (and touched and lavishly described), not heard. One afternoon, as Will is having his brutal way with him, Arthur lets out “little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back.”
This habit of objectification has been a blemish on what is probably the finest body of work by a living writer of English prose, so it’s intriguing to see Hollinghurst break it in his latest novel, in which, for the first time, he gives the floor to a narrator of color. “Our Evenings” (Random House) is the story of Dave Win, the son of a white British woman who, in the late nineteen-forties, while working as a secretary for the British colonial administration in Rangoon, had a brief affair with a Burmese man. Dave never meets his father or shows much interest in his Burmese heritage, but his foreign looks make him a striking presence in the rural town where he grows up, and where his mother runs a dressmaking business. His childhood—indeed, his whole life—is a thick anthology of what we’d now call microaggressions. Out for a walk one evening with his mother, Dave smiles politely at a passerby: “The woman herself looked astonished by my smile as I stood aside for her—it was as if I’d made a joke at her expense, and when Mum said, ‘Good evening,’ she gasped, very quietly, took two or three steps herself off the path as she skirted us, with a frosty nod that acknowledged and dismissed the courtesy at the same time.”
When Dave wins a scholarship to a local boarding school, called Bampton, he’s exposed to the far less subtle racism of the British upper classes. The scholarship is funded by the wealthy Hadlow family, whose son, Giles, another brutish toff, is also at Bampton. On a formative visit to Woolpeck, the Hadlows’ country house, Dave is sadistically bullied by his schoolmate, who calls him a “dirty mongrel” and generally treats him like a slave and a toy. Giles’s parents, Mark and Cara, a pair of socially progressive philanthropists, are more benign. Mark, in particular, takes a genuine interest in Dave, becoming a kindly patron.
At Bampton, an all-boys school, Dave makes two important discoveries: his gift for acting and his attraction to his classmates. It’s the nineteen-sixties, the legalization of gay sex is being hotly debated, and liberation is in the air. But Dave, feeling that he has his hands full with just the one kind of prejudice, chooses to conceal his sexuality with “the clever but involuntary disguise of being already conspicuous for something else.” It’s not until he gets to Oxford, on another scholarship, that he begins openly pursuing men. His infatuation with a fellow gay student is tenderly evoked, but it comes to nothing. In a humiliating twist, his academic promise, too, goes unconsummated. Riding high on confidence in his intellectual powers (everyone assumes he’ll get a first), Dave neglects to study for his terminal exams, instead devoting his final months at Oxford to a production of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone.” His stage performance is a triumph; the exams are a fiasco.
This is the end of Part 1, the book’s midpoint. Two hundred and sixty pages have been devoted to recounting Dave’s life from boarding school through university. In “The Stranger’s Child” (2011), Hollinghurst bounded over great swaths of English history in a series of temporally discrete episodes narrated in the third person; a segment set on the eve of the First World War was followed by one that took place in the twenties, before we skipped again to the late sixties, and so on. “The Sparsholt Affair,” his next novel, proceeded in much the same fashion, and, reading “Our Evenings,” one might have expected a bracing jump cut from Dave’s disastrous exams to, say, a West End opening in the middle of the Thatcher era. Instead, the book just keeps going, trundling through the years.
And so we learn, in some detail, about Dave’s career in avant-garde theatre, his deepening emotional ties to his mother, and his relationships with various men. Meanwhile, the Hadlows wander on and off the stage, Mark and Cara performing their good works while Giles rises through the ranks of the Conservative Party. Though there are one or two abrupt discontinuities, the first person softens the transitions: it is the same Dave talking to us, in his stately, keen-eyed prose.
The book contains moments of extraordinary beauty and set pieces as powerful as anything Hollinghurst has written. One of them involves a visit that Dave, in his mid-twenties, pays to the aged Derry Blundell, a legendary gay theatre director—“legendary” in the sense of being essentially unknown to all but a circle of insiders. In a moment of high comedy, Dave zones out during one of his host’s nostalgic speeches only to realize, when his focus returns, that he has passively consented to a blow job. A less subtle writer might have played the scene as sexual farce, but Hollinghurst, though very funny, is also poignantly attuned to the gulf in significance the encounter holds for each man. “I was so hard he had a struggle to get it out through the fly,” Dave tells us, his thoughts having strayed, during Blundell’s monologue, to a new lover awaiting his return home: “ ‘Goodness . . .’ he said then, reassessing the task. He was like an old man praying in stoical discomfort, and also, as he flexed his jaws and brought saliva to his mouth, a workman who could deal with most emergencies.” Too often sex writing is judged merely by how sexy it is. In “Our Evenings,” Hollinghurst shows how much else it can convey: distraction, estrangement, a fond attentiveness.
Hollinghurst writes movingly about Dave’s experience of British racism, evoking the humanity and inner life of someone frequently presumed to have neither. The snubs and taunts and unconsidered inquiries (“Been in England long?”) seem to occur on every other page, and yet the tedium is mimetic; for Dave, there is no reprieve. The qualified and provisional sense of belonging that haunted him during childhood remains fully intact near the end of his life. This reality comes bleakly into focus when he returns to his home town after the death of his mother:
But not quite belonging to a place, as Hollinghurst has shown throughout his work, often allows you to see that place more clearly. One of the ironies of prejudice, so nimbly captured in “Our Evenings,” is that, while the racist thinks he knows the truth about people based on their appearance, it’s the person subjected to his abuse who gets to know the truth about the racist.
For all these strengths, however, the book is oddly lacking in cumulative force; in place of direction and momentum, there is simply an exquisite drift. Exactly what we are reading “for,” beyond the crystalline impressions of a sensitive, intelligent man, is never really clear. One recalls Henry James’s line about “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation,” which he warned was a pitfall for extended first-person narratives. Late in “Our Evenings,” Dave tells some friends that he’s been writing his memoirs, explaining, “I remember places, and experiences, very clearly, but they’re stills, you know, rather than clips. Or GIFs perhaps, sometimes—a head turns, a hand comes down, but you never see what comes next, it just does it again.” Evidently he’s describing the book we’ve been reading and its somewhat halting narrative effect, but Dave’s comments sound more like an ex-post-facto rationale than the revelation of a grand design.
Perhaps a strategic loosening of novelistic form was what Hollinghurst was going for, in an effort to capture the enigma of the recollected past. The consequence, all the same, is to point up another of the book’s shortcomings. “Our Evenings” belongs to Dave Win in a way that none of Hollinghurst’s previous novels belong to their main characters. Often overlooked in his acting life, playing Jaques and Fabian, never Hamlet or Lear, Dave is center stage here for almost five hundred pages. His various relationships arrest our attention but then tend to fall by the narrative wayside, so that what we’re left with is a man talking to himself, a soliloquy with cameos. It’s a role that calls for someone richly dimensional. Is Dave up to the task?
If the lordly Will Beckwith was something of a fantasy figure, as Hollinghurst has conceded, later protagonists have tended to be closer to their creator in background. Edward Manners, from “The Folding Star” (1994), and Nick Guest, from “The Line of Beauty” (2004), are middle-class strivers from the provinces. Both men believe that their intelligence and refinement are a license for antinomian excess. Given the prerogatives of intimacy, Hollinghurst could fearlessly bring out what was monstrous or absurd about them. In “Our Evenings,” political decorum may have tied his hands. Dave Win has plenty of sex and even commits the odd infidelity, but compared with his predecessors he is notably well behaved. The qualities that make him so admirable—his sanity and compassion and resilience—also render him, and the book he dominates, a little bland. Edward and Nick are allowed to be by turns predatory and romantic, brutal and endearing; Dave is denied such vivifying freedoms. There are issues of social verisimilitude at play in this imbalance (a biracial man might not get away with behaving the way Edward or Nick do), but they have artistic side effects.
The problem is compounded by Giles, who, despite his appealing name, is a lifeless caricature of upper-class philistinism. In a brief prelude, we learn that he was one of the architects of the Brexit referendum and may be destined for Downing Street. Almost every appearance he makes in the subsequent pages contains some winking acknowledgment of the future that awaits him, whether he’s disparaging his father’s Citroën (“an ugly foreign object”) as a teen-ager or laying into the Common Market during a visit to Bampton as a Tory grandee. His ambition and synthetic public persona are the butt of countless withering drolleries. “He was looking very pleased with himself,” a friend tells Dave after seeing Giles on “Question Time,” a BBC current-affairs program. “Not an absolutely new experience for him,” Dave replies.
Clearly, the two men are supposed to represent competing visions of Britishness: the one tolerant and outward-looking, drawing on the country’s rich heritage as a way to move the culture forward, the other entitled and small-minded, invested in the past only as a tool of propaganda. Dave acts onstage, in service of artistic truth; Giles, on the stage of public life, peddles demagogic fictions. With the latter vision ascendant, Dave finds himself increasingly unwelcome in the only home he has. Hollinghurst wrings tremendous pathos from this development, but it doesn’t save the book from feeling morally schematic. In “Our Evenings,” the righteous and the wicked are emphatically distinct. It’s a frustrating outcome, especially from a writer who once set his work in that uncertain territory beyond good and evil. ♦
